Monthly Archives: February 2017

Here’s the Coleman Avenue bridge, by the big shopping center at Taylor, where the recent floods have provided for the latest sculpture to hit San José, this time in the middle of the river. Like many sculptures in the city, it’s a meaningless technical exercise, an immense MS Paint job executed by not even an amateur but a disinterested user. The title of the piece is “Interpolating Concepts,” grabbed mid-paragraph from the piece’s indecipherable pseudo-philosophical justification, which is attached to the river bed and visible only to divers.

“Interpolating Concepts”

The medium is pile of sticks and tree trunks on a plinth of rocks with support from a live tree.

When in fifty years, when the vacuous tech-boom society of Google employees collectively decides, based on a single meme, that this is the most important art of their era, and the artist is asked about his motivation, he’ll have nothing to say but that his boss commissioned it in order to show some long-vanished investors the company’s edgy design ideas, much like the inverted 3D-printed cone on the steps of the Convention Center.

The piece unfortunately took very little logistics to produce, practically zero quarterbacking of dealmaking with Chinese suppliers, and therefore practically zero child laborers were exploited in order to produce it, unlike the iPhone. Americans get off on the idea that everything they consume, including art materials, are produced under the most egregiously, unnecessarily harmful and exploitative means, because it amplifies their sensation that “we’re lucky to live here,” even though they themselves cause the rest of wherever else to not be so lucky a location.

The sculpture, nonetheless, unfortunately doesn’t really hit the latter points in any way.

Natalie Watkins is a figure and portrait artist from Stockton (*I gather) with really nice business cards, whom I met at Local Color’s zine fest. She’s put her watercolors and stuff into a zine called Conjoined:

Here’s one of her Trump portraits, which go cheap and would make great gifts or decorations for homes, offices, classrooms and public drinking establishments.

I don’t know if the portrait is rendered in blood and feces, but that’s what I like to think when I gaze. Watkins says the following about her work: “I do not aim to be a realist painter because I love manipulating the photograph with color and brush strokes.”

Totally forgot about this one until I was reorganizing my stuff. 2-Strats tells Dicknose, who doesn’t actually listen when you talk to him, to make him Rodka. The half-measure taken by the forgetful Dicknose is turns out to be a real cocktail. Dated 5.12.

Almost forgot to mention Smuttywood, whose charming integrants I met at Local Color during their zine fest in downtown San José. They make comics about either famous people’s dicks and boobs or famous people portrayed as dicks and boobs. The thing that caught my attention, however, was the photographic zine Men are Disposable, which I regrettably didn’t buy, but which you can order at their site. They make great gifts!

Here’s some arty stuff I managed to squeeze out of my crap phone camera. Radioactive saturated groundwater escaping from a large bus stop in Chernobyl. Doesn’t really do the setting justice but the colors are cool.

Something about having all that water going under the freeway pylons seemed to give the pylons a meaning or at least aesthetic place that they’d never had before. Might as well take a picture, especially since this kind of weather won’t come again for almost 30 more years! I miss having my real camera loaded all the time, but lo, too many hobbies get expensive.

1. Looking over the emergency underground spillway, toward southeast, from the west bank near Children’s Discovery Museum. Those huge sugarcubes of rubble on the east bank are usually covered in tents and people’s stuff but they hit it a few weeks ago.

2. As above only looking due south.

3. From the east bank looking north. The furthest visible pylon is what we see in the topmost image above. The blade of the underground spillway wall is illuminated at left in the very back.

One reliable spot to get redeemable materials on a Sunday morning is the parking lot at the Convention Center’s indoor soccer field. Someone needs to learn to finish a handle! Anyone’s jonesing, I’m sure it’s still there.